“Are you trying to tell me Pighee doesn’t count as ‘permanently injured’?”
“In a coma, unconscious, a firm diagnosis can’t be made. And with no claim . . .”
I found it all a bit difficult to take. “And you were going to keep him wired up forever?”
“No,” she said. “Just a year and a day.”
“A year and a day?” I shook my head in wonderment.
“After a year and a day,” she said, “his death would no longer be the result of the accident.”
“What?”
“It’s the law. Not only in Indiana. In most states. And besides, we hope to have the operation wrapped up by then.”
“On January 28th or 29th you were going to pull the plug on him?”
“On it,” she said. “He is dead, after all. Yes, we will.”
“This is a bit much to take in,” I said. “Just how was it you were going to get around practicing medicine without a license?”
“I haven’t been,” she said. “You can’t practice medicine on someone who’s dead. I’ve never done anything on someone who was alive.”
“But he’s not certified as dead.”
“Well, no.”
“My God. What a crew.”
She said, “Now, look, Mr. Samson—”
But I interrupted. “All right. As far as you’re concerned, that’s just an adjunct to the operation you’re supposed to be working on.”
“It’s very important,” she said piously.
“The police, in the form of Captain Gartland, seem to think that you and your colleagues are working for the F.B.I.”
“We are,” she said.
“Are you an agent?”
“Not in the full-time sense. We were recruited for a special project. It required specialists, scientists. We are doing work that requires a good deal of scientific sophistication.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Pighee was in an explosion. Is it something to do with explosives?”
“No comment.”
“You’ve got radioactive material of some sort in there. What kind of work requires radioactive materials?”
“Look, Mr. Samson—”
“Was there radioactive material in the lab when Pighee was blown up? Is he contaminated with it? Does that have something to do with whatever is happening?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I never thought about whether he might . . .”
But whatever had been overlooked, radioactive contamination didn’t play a part in what was being covered up. Her surprise was genuine, as I read it.
“How much of the lab was destroyed when Pighee blew up?”
“Quite a bit,” she said.
“But it looks all right now, and full of toys that look expensive.”
“They are.”
“No expenses spared for the F.B.I., is that it?”
“Something like that.”
“And this place,” I said, waving a hand at the fittings in the room. “No expenses spared here. The F.B.I. pays pretty well, does it?”
“Well . . .” It meant yes. I already knew it paid well, because of the extra money floating around John Pighee.
“How were you recruited?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you—”
“Who was it? Dundree? Rush? How long have you been involved?”
“Several years. It . . . Lee was the one who sounded me out about it. We worked together and then he talked to me about it.”
“He courted you when you first came to work at Loftus, did he?”
“Courted me?” she said, with a pained smile. “You use a funny old word.”
“I’m a funny old man,” I said.
“There was nothing like that with him then,” she said. “We just worked together . . . They made contact through him.”
“How did you know they were real?” I asked.
“Real?”
“If someone comes up in the street and says they work with the F.B.I., you don’t just take their word for it, do you?”
“They didn’t come up in the street.”
“But they must have corroborated it somehow. Do you get paid from Washington? Or get Christmas cards from the Chief?”
“I . . . I don’t get paid from Washington. I’m undercover. There were letters and identification. And besides, they are respectable people.”
“Like Lee Seafield?”
“Lee’s all right. He’s respectable. But the others are—”
She was going to say something like “above reproach,” but instead the doorbell rang.
She went rigid. Listened hard, as if she hadn’t heard it the first time. There was a pause. Then it rang again. She jumped up out of her chair. “Who can that be?” she asked.
“It’s your apartment,” I said.
The bell rang again. “How did he get up here without ringing the downstairs buzzer? God. Oh, God. Don’t leave me. He knows I’m here, because the car’s parked out front. He should be at the lab. So should I. My God. Don’t leave.” She ran into the bedroom.
Chapter Thirty Two
By the time the doorbell rang insistently for the fourth time, Marcia Merom, Ph.D., had returned from the bedroom carrying her gun. She seemed much calmer, as if the weight of the oversized thing itself steadied her.
As the would-be visitor banged on the door, she slipped the weapon under a cushion on the couch. I had become extremely uncomfortable. Not just because of the gun, but because of the roller-coaster changes in Merom’s apparent personality.
From outside, a syrupy and suggestive voice called, “Marcia Janet Merom. I know you’re in there. You’re going to let me in, Marcia Janet Merom.”
Merom fluffed up her hair, a reflex that made me pity her. Then she opened the door wide, and stood out of the line of sight.
Seafield saw me first. He wasn’t pleased. He paused. He thought. Then he marched into the room, and virtually without looking at Merom he closed the door and locked it.
He pointed a finger at me. He nodded and said, “The fart private detective.”
Merom sat down on the couch and slipped her hand under the cushion that covered her revolver. If it comforted her, she was the only one.
Seafield stood in front of where I sat and looked like Paul Bunyan. “You don’t know when to keep your nose out of other people’s business,” he said. Then to Merom, “What’s he doing here, Marcy?”
“I can see who I want to,” she said, mistakenly responding as if the question had been from the jealous lover, when it had been from the suspicious covert conspirator. Whatever the details, he obviously had her twisted into knots emotionally.
“You’re supposed to be at the lab,” he said, as a matter of fact.
“What have you been telling him?”
“He knows most of it already,” she said more stoutly.
“And what he didn’t know you’ve been filling in, I suppose,” Seafield said. “Including what happened to the treacherous John Pighee.”
“No,” Merom said suddenly. And more leisurely, “But he knows about John’s . . . condition.”
“If you’ve told him anything, anything at all—”
“He already knew!” she pleaded, and began to cry.
“If you’ve told him anything,” Seafield insisted, “I’m not answerable. It’s not up to you to take on that kind of responsibility.”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” she whined. “He already knew it. I didn’t say anything.”
Seafield said to me, “You’d better go now.” He had nearly a foot on me when I was standing; when I was sitting, he seemed to be suspended from the ceiling.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Dr. Merom and I were talking when you intruded. I don’t know what kind of personal hold you have over her, but she seems to fear you. I’m not leaving until you do.”
Seafield just smiled at first. “You like to play rough, do yo
u?” he asked. “She likes that. You like playing rough, don’t you, Marcy?”
“No!”
“I ought to know,” Seafield intoned. “I ought to know.”
I stood up.
“You’re still too little,” Seafield said. I felt like a bear being baited. Fortunately I have a small mental advantage over a bear. I stepped behind the couch to the telephone. While I dialed, I made small talk. “You know your way around this apartment pretty well,” I said. “You’d been here even before Dr. Merom moved in, yes?”
Seafield grew dark, instead of merely casually threatening. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I heard the phone being answered and held the earpiece away so they would have a chance to hear as the reception officer said, “Homicide and Robbery with Violence. May I help you?”
“Lieutenant Miller, please,” I said.
But it was a brief conversation. Seafield ripped the phone wire out of the wall.
“Well, well,” I said. He was the bear now. I stared hard at him, and grinned like Davy Crockett.
He thought, balancing wisdom against preference in deciding how to deal with me. Wisdom won. He said, “I’ll wait outside. I’ll give you ten minutes.” He went to the door, unlocked it, and turned back to us with an ugly leer. “She doesn’t like to take any longer than that anyway,” he said. He closed the door behind him
Merom sighed. I turned to face her. She was only partly expressing relief. The other part seemed to be an unmistakably sexual kind of admiration. I realized she had been watching, not crying, as Seafield and I had held our little showdown.
I didn’t really understand what had happened in either of them, why he had backed down for ten minutes, and why she was now stepping up. But I’d won a victory, however temporary, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t Pyrrhic.
“Come on,” I said to Merom. I had another question or two.
“What?” Words had broken the initial spell.
“He’s out there.” I pointed to the front door. “So we’re going out there.” Through the kitchen.
She hesitated, uncertain again.
I tried to be reasonable. “You can’t live under his constant threat. You can’t come back here until the phone is fixed. It’s your only protection.”
But reason didn’t impress her, Ph.D. or no Ph.D. She looked one way, then the other.
Her dithering only made me angry. I shouted, “Move!”
The volume startled her, but made her act. She walked smartly toward the kitchen door, and as she passed me she took my hand.
Chapter Thirty Three
We went down the back stairs and around the side of the apartment building to my van. It wasn’t a long time for me to work out how it was I came to be walking hand in hand with Marcia Merom in the dark August night.
But long enough. What had happened to me must have happened to a lot of people who knew her. Seafield said she liked playing rough, and he had been telling a form of the truth. Merom seemed to be missing something when it came to dealing with people. A missing synapse that meant she couldn’t respond to civilized and gentle urgings. But let someone shout, or insist, let someone treat her roughly, then the gap was jumped, and what was asked of her she gave. Either to Seafield, who was a ruffian by style. Or to me, insistent because I lacked other options. I’d won a tiny battle with Seafield: then, to hurry her along, I’d shown anger. She was mine.
She got in the passenger’s seat.
I started the engine and tried to sort out how unnice I had to be to get the answers to the questions I wanted to ask. And where to go to ask them. We couldn’t stay put. Seafield’s time would be up before long, and his patience not long after that. The man wasn’t stupid; he’d realize that we’d ducked out the back.
At first I headed for home. But by the time I had gone through Monument Circle and was about to turn off Meridian onto West Maryland, I realized that when Seafield figured out that we’d left the back way, he would probably head straight for my office. He’d been there before while I was away, at least once.
I turned onto Maryland anyway. There was no Thunderbird parked on Maryland in the vicinity of my office. But it was only a matter of time.
I pulled to the side of the road to think. In the process, I patted all my pockets and got an idea. It’s a good thing I don’t automatically change to a clean pair of pants each week. I still had the keys to Linn Pighee’s house.
I pulled out again and turned south, to find Madison, then southwest to aim at Beech Grove. Questioning Merom hard in the Pighees’ house appealed to me.
It was in Garfield Park that I realized what was wrong with that idea. We’d just crossed Pleasant Run, one of the city’s little White River tributaries, and were coming up to a bridge over Bean Creek, a tributary to Pleasant Run. I pulled over to the side of the road again.
Merom squirmed in her seat, seeing us parked in a park in the dark. “What’s happening?” she asked.
I should have told her to shut up. Instead I said, “I’m thinking.” Not nearly so impressive to her.
What I was thinking was about Sam and Ray McGonigle. I didn’t know when they would be coming back to my office. It would do Ray no good at all if Seafield found him at my place and connected him with me.
The only thing to do was to go back to the office.
Merom said, “I really should get back to the lab. I’ve got work unfinished there.”
“Quiet,” I said, but without adequate conviction. My ascendancy had slipped. I made a U-turn on the park road. “We’re going to my office,” I said. I was trying to be forceful, but it came out explanatory and therefore weak in the terms I had decided Merom worked in.
While I drove, I wondered if I was right about her. Certainty gave way to fuzziness. I’m not a natural bully.
I tried to rebuild my resolve. There were things I needed to know. Seafield had accused her of telling me what had “happened to the treacherous John Pighee.” I wanted to make his accusation justified. I also needed to know, accurately and in detail, the nature of this F.B.I. project. And I needed to know how people had become involved in it.
“Are you from Indianapolis?” I asked Merom.
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
“Originally, Lewisburg. Pennsylvania.”
“How do you happen to be here?”
“It’s not easy to get research jobs. There are too many doctorates around. Even too many women. For the jobs. It was the best I was offered.”
“How long have you been with Loftus?”
“A little over four and a half years.”
“Did you go straight into the apartment you have now?”
“No,” she said.
“When did you get it?”
“About . . .” But she decided not to answer. “Are you going to take me back to the lab or not?”
“We haven’t finished our business,” I said.
“I don’t think I’ve got anything to say to you. I don’t think we’ve got any business.”
“Oh, yes, we do,” I said, and felt the blood rising again.
“I don’t think so.” She slouched in her seat and looked out the window. “I want to go to the lab.”
“Do you know what happened to the last Loftus scientist who lived in your apartment?”
“No,” she said without interest.
“He accidentally fell off the back porch and broke his neck.”
Her head turned toward me. I had her attention again. She didn’t speak.
“What,” I asked, “did John Pighee do to make you people decide to kill him?”
“We didn’t decide,” she said. And then tensed.
“Your friend Lee took it on himself, did he?”
“He’s . . . It wasn’t like that.” She seemed about to speak again, didn’t, then did. “You’re in pretty bad trouble, you know. The things you are poking around in could—will—put a lot of other people at risk.”
“Is that what
John Pighee did? Put the rest of you at risk?”
“John was selling out,” she said.
It was food for thought. I thought for a while. We were getting close to my downtown home. “So Lee killed him.”
“He had to be stopped somehow. But what happened wasn’t what we had in mind.”
“I see,” I said. “Lee jumped the gun and did it on his own.” “Something like that.”
“And he’s going to do the same to me, is he?”
“You are a terrible danger to us,” she said. “And it doesn’t look as if the police are able to keep you under control.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m no threat to you if you’re what you say you are.”
“And just what does that mean?” she asked.
“If you’re really F.B.I. on a real project.”
“Of course we are,” she snapped. “Don’t be stupid.”
“All I need is some corroboration, whatever they used to convince you.”
“Ask the police,” she said.
“Whatever they used to convince the police will do,” I said. “I’m interested in checking the truth. That’s all. Pass the message on to the people in charge. Not Seafield, but Jay Dundree. Henry Rush. Or someone else.”
She didn’t say anything.
We pulled up near my office behind a new Plymouth. I looked around for a Thunderbird but didn’t see one.
“Where’s this?” Merom asked.
I was about to answer when I saw Sam and Ray get out of the Plymouth. Instead of words, I said, “Ah uh uh mmm.” Then, “Is that Seafield’s car over there?” I pointed to the other side of the road. There was only an old pickup truck.
“Where?” she asked.
“Over there, near the corner.”
“I don’t see anything.”
I started the van.
“Where are we going?”
“You wanted to go to the lab,” I said. “I’m going to take you to a cab.”
“A cab?”
“You don’t want to walk, do you?”
We found a cabstand near the bus station. I pulled up near the first taxi and walked her to it. I held the door for her and told the driver, “Loftus Pharmaceuticals.”
“And how am I supposed to get home?” Merom asked me.
The Silent Salesman Page 19